Supervisors -

Met with my supervisors yesterday for a review of my Lit Review. It went well and lots of thoughts and ideas came out of it, most importantly NOT taking on to much, in terms of research question. In my mind its whittled down to something like this, SEA art practice involved the viewer as participant/collaborator, as a result the discipline developed a critique of 'publics' as part of its methodology; Social Media makes use of terms to describe and involve it's public - the creativity of the multitude etc - and much critique has been written about the commercial exploitation of this 'public', in defining these two bodies of practice and critique could a set of parameters and insights be generated when thinking about web 3.0 - the semantic web - as a site for cultural activity commensurate with a new media socially engaged art practice NMSEA practice.

Public Data Activities

Just looking at the latest post from the OKF blog, and this having coincided with my finishing a draft of my chapter about web 2.0 - it feels very much where my research is heading. That the  methodologies of Web 2.0 - as scholz has stated there is a history of social media outside of tose constituted by commercial web 2.0 apps, in part derived from OS and activist media practices, can be used to act upon the huge amount of data sets that are becoming available via initiatives such as OKF. The issue for me, as practitioner is how to interface with these datasets; in thinking of them as material I feel compelled to get my hands on them and much about, but do not have the technical ability to do this. I need therefore to learn this, and quick, but this would happen in a more informed and collective manner, borrowing from the  communitarian nature of OS, rather than some lone, fiddler, artist type, trouble is I might be that type.

Landscape-Portrait OKF

I submitted an outline of Landscape-Portrait to OKF, my thought was to see if there was any interest in taking the data produced so far and making it available via Open Data protocols. This has always been the objective, and hopefully with some help this will be achievable. One thing, my making it open the stories that the site contains are made public, to used in any manner, I need to think about this, and how participants of the work might feel about it.

Open Knowledge Foundation

Really enjoying looking through the projects of the OKF, these two in particular really appeal to me and are inspiring many possibilities.

• http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/blueplaque/
• http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/tombstone/

Open Street Map

I was following a link from the Open Knowledge Foundation which linked to http://www.openstreetmap.org/ - A Wiki based map that allows account holders to author content on the map. I was thinking initially that this would be personal generated content, such as drawings etc, I had in mind this database of geo tagged line drawings, mmmm, but this was not the case, more gps route markings and transfer of different data sets. Still and interesting project when thinking of a base up on which to locate a work. What really works for me is the diary section, where the thinking and reasoning behind the mapping is contextualised, here's an extract: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/aekkarine/diary/13091

file types

I've been thinking about these new file types that are being released, massive database files that contain a range of media, data content. The manner of their production and the means of their distribution interest me greatly, that they might contain dynamic & static data, raster and vector operate as a meta file, database etc. My thought might be to develop a file type. '.kev' files for example, this file type might provide for a complete public art meta file dealing with some of the issues highlighted by the ReallyGoodBad public art project. Need to find more about file formats and how they gain interoperability.

Public Art DB

Just came across this old posting - kinda relevant:

http://blog.okfn.org/2011/02/01/art-open-data/